Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 923 posts

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#271

Post by the_biot »

ardit33 wrote: post #160

I left Meta a while ago... but these layoffs (multiple rounds every year) have been very demoralizing to the folks there. I survived all three rounds of layoffs, but I saw multiple great colleagues (some of them had been there for 10+ years), getting laid off. After so many re-orgs, I had enough and quit. It was just not worth it (all that uncertainity, people were unhappy, hunger games into trying to get a good rati…

Right. People on here are just ignoring the fact that the fantastically expensive metaverse effort has failed, and it's pretty obvious that people working on it thus no longer have anything to do, so will mostly be let go. The article even mentions this as a likely cause.

I mean I get it, Meta is evil, inefficient etc, but this layoff round seems pretty predictable.

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#272

Post by mediaman »

dnnddidiej wrote: post #253
jeffbee wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strongly held but apparently not popular opinion: candidates should not be expected, and should refuse, to discuss confidential internals of their former employers.

Agreed, but what has it got to do with what you replied to?

I think he's saying that during interviews the candidates were being asked to dive deep into their preceding employers' tech stacks. Which does seem to be asking them to tread in dicey legal waters in a coercive situation.

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#273

Post by mapme »

pembrook wrote: post #243
pipes wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying you interviewed meta engineers and found this? Or is this speculation?

As someone who has worked at big tech (and interviewed fellow big tech workers), I can confirm this is pretty typical. People from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, etc...it's all the same. Given the size of these organizations (anywhere from 100K-300K employees if you include contractors), there's a vanishingly small chance the individual you're interviewing had influence or responsibility over any important thing spe…

Who is more impactful, the startup engineer who singlehandedly ships a feature that increases a startup revenue by 25% off a base $5M/yr ($1M extra rev), or a Meta/Google team of 5 engineers who ship a .01% revenue improve off a base of 150B/yr (15M/5 = $3M/engineer).

As an engineer you are thinking about impact as 'scope' or 'features'. Leadership will be thinking marginally on what adding a net new engineer will provide to the business.

“Marginalism is the economic doctrine that we can best understand value by considering the question of how many units of a good or service an individual has, and using that starting point to ask how much an additional – or marginal – unit would be worth in terms of other goods and services.”

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#275

Post by disillusioned »

rsanek wrote: post #255
hintymad wrote: post #205

Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview ques…

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Yeah, but, just objectively speaking, look at how many _more_ business lines and units and actual PRODUCTS each of those other companies ship in comparison.

Meta has... Facebook. Instagram. Threads, if you want to count it. What'sApp. The ad-tech that powers those things. A black hole of a VR division that has since been eviscerated after billions burned. An AR/device divison that sells glasses. And a burgeoning supernova of an AI division, just one singular hire of which is responsible for $1.5B in pay (over 6 years).

Google/Alphabet has........ an entire consumer hardware family ranging from cameras to doorbells to smart displays to streamers, YouTube, YouTubeTV, Android, Chrome, Google itself, Gemini, GCP, Waymo, GoogleFi, Google Fiber, Ads, Infra/Analytics, Maps, dozens of other apps... on and on.

Microsoft has Azure, Windows, Office (each of which are obviously _suites_ of more complex software), Xbox, LinkedIn, Dynamics, Surface, etc.

If anything, Apple _might_ be a slightly closer analog to Meta in that they're just a bit more limited, but their hardware engineering side is obviously a massive part of that, supply chain, software, MacOS, iOS, all of their adjacent first-party apps, App Store, iCloud, AppleTV, retail...

Meta just... isn't in the same league in terms of pure surface area. Mark just leaned extremely hard into acquiring as much nascent talent as possible and hoped he'd have the use cases to make it make sense but was content to spend the money in the meantime on looking busy. Now that CapEx has to go to compute/DCs/GWs for their AI which... kind of no one wants? But he's going to bet as much of the company as possible to stay relevant and try to be a player in the space. He's just doing it in this tail-wagging-the-dog hyper-overpay-individual-researchers approach that, from the outside at least, seems extremely risky...

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#276

Post by fragmede »

oytis wrote: post #269
rsanek wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta has about 10% more employees now than they did at the end of 2021. They currently have less than half the employees of Google or Apple; only a third of Microsoft. If you're right, the rest of big tech is in a much worse position.

Apple makes cutting edge hardware, at least two operating systems and lots of user applications. Google makes search, cloud, a decent office suite with the largest mail server in the world and of course cutting edge AI. It's easy to see why either of them needs twice as many people as Meta

Whatsapp powers entire economies, outside of North America. And then there's Instagram. If we're going by that reasoning, Meta's undersized.

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#278

Post by laweijfmvo »

hintymad wrote: post #205

Let's be honest, Meta over hired. Big time. If anyone ever interviewed a few Meta engineers, he would easily see that a large percentage of them had really small, and sometimes bullshit scopes. As a result, such engineers couldn't articulate what they do in Meta, couldn't deep dive into their own tech stacks, nor could solve common-sense design questions when they just deviated a bit from those popular interview ques…

it stems from an abundance of ineffective and abysmal leadership, where someone finds themselves in a position of importance and the only thing they know how to do is hire subordinates to blame or rely on. Those subordinates need headcount, and so it goes all the way down to bloated teams of ICs.

some people call it empire building, but it’s really just incompetence.

Re: Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

#280

Post by mswphd »

pipes wrote: post #238
dsign wrote: post #84

I wouldn't make much of it; the economy looks a bit iffy right now due to the surge in energy prices and difficulties sourcing inputs. This affects mainly industrial enterprises, shipping and transport but those are no small sectors and anything that affects them ripples through the rest of the global economy. Where I live (Northern Europe), not only are those sectors already sacking people, but the banks are rising…

The raising interest rates right now makes no sense to me. Energy prices and layoffs will kill spending power. I think the central banks will overcompensate because they got inflation so wrong the last time.

inflation has been persistently > 2% (and arguably much more, as the current methodology on how to measure inflation is quite flawed). There's a definite risk of inflation expectations shifting, which central bankers really want to avoid.

Your point that there's a recessionary risk is real, but lowering rates might lead to stagflation. Both options are pretty bad honestly.

Post reply on HN